23 de fevereiro de 2014

Robert Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, chairs a discussion with Michael Schudson, professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Nicholas Lemann, professor and former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, and Michael Massing, contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review.

Based on the figures included in the patent application, it looks to me like Google is trying to patent the widest possible variety of screen configurations, not just a single device. It’s not clear to me what Google is working towards, but it does seem likely that most of the designs Google is trying to patent have already been tried on the gadget market and found wanting.

Amazon is notorious for a lack of transparency when it comes to e-book sales, leaving many to do their own guessing about what exactly goes on inside the black box. While some authors have tried to pry their way in by releasing their own numbers, it’s never been enough to really put together a sense of how big the market is, genre share, etc.Until now. And while Amazon hasn’t handed out the keys to the box, someone’s essentially jimmied their way in. Hugh Howey, author of the best-selling indie published Wool, found a way to crawl Amazon’s bestseller lists and determine the breakdown of share across publisher type, genre and format for roughly 7000 total books.

"Ebooks have changed everything and the traditional publishing establishment is not quite keeping up," Brenna Aubrey answered when I asked her about some of the negative responses to her decision from traditionally-published authors. "I also think that in some ways authors who have been chasing their own dream deals take my rejection of the dream deal as a rejection of their core values and aspirations."

Rakuten bought Kobo in late 2011, and while they’ve always been somewhat cagey about financial details they have in the past shared a few nuggets of info. For example, in their 2012 annual report Rakuten told us that Kobo revenues were up 143%, and that at the end of 2012 Kobo had 12 million users.On Friday Rakuten revealed that Kobo’s Q4 content revenues were up 44% over 2012. They also shared that Kobo now has 18 million users. This we already knew from the news a couple weeks ago about longtime Rakuten exec Takahito Aiki taking over as CEO of Kobo, but it is good to have confirmation that the stat is current.

Worldwide, digital reading is accelerating, even though 4% of readers actually do it exclusively. Ebooks made up 17% of sales at Harper Collins unit over the holidays, up from 14% last year and nothing five years ago. Ebooks hit 33% of sales at the Hachette Book Group and 23% at Simon and Schuster.Worldwide, more people are reading eBooks, but they are still buying books at their local bookstore or second hand shop. Bookstores over their lifetime have basically had a monopoly on sales, but the industry has been disrupted by companies like Amazon, Kobo and Sony. This is prompting bookstores to free up bookshelves with lifestyle items, such as pillows, wine glasses and candles. No major bookstore, other than Barnes and Noble has actually made their own digital system. This is actually a bad thing, because bookstores aren’t substituting lost sales with digital ones.

Readium for Chrome has been upgraded with a more modern user experience, and retargeted to be based on the latest ReadiumJS codebase (shared with its cross-browser sibling readium-js-viewer and close cousin Readium SDK). The Readium Chrome browser extension is now available for free download from the Chrome Web Store, and existing users will automatically receive the upgrade.The Readium project, launched February 2012, was the first open source EPUB 3 reading system. The success and adoption of the initial Chrome extension was a major motivation leading to the formation of the Readium Foundation (Readium.org) in March, 2013. Readium.org is now supported by 40 organization members.

A cursory glance at the statistics for the US ebook market will tell you most people are sticking with paper, and there’s a good reason for that. As the following infographic will show you, paper books fill many uses which ebooks cannot.The infographic is based on a poll conducted recently by Fatbrain, a UK-based used book marketplace. Over 1,000 Fatbrain users responded, and they revealed that the most popular reason for staying with paper reflected their emotional attachment, and not any practical use.

First of all, an increasing portion of sales has moved online, both for print books and, obviously, for ebooks, which are only sold that way. Including both online and physical sales, U.S. publishers had revenues of $15 billion in 2012, the most recently reported annual figure from the Association of American Publishers. That’s up 14% from 2008 – not bad. Dig a little deeper and you’ll see that, within the total, ebook sales rose from $68 million to $3 billion, what’s technically known as a gazillion percent increase. Absent ebooks, total print book sales did shrink about 8%.That’s enough right there to disprove the pessimists and ebook critics. It also certainly ought to embarrass the New Yorker, which last week published its third -- and most off-base yet – profile of Amazon and its impact on the book market. Trotting out many of the same anecdotes Ken Auletta used in his 2010 New Yorker article, writer George Packer cites innumerable unnamed agents and publishers who worry Amazon doesn’t really care about books as they do. By encouraging low-priced, self-published ebooks, in the end, quality literature will be destroyed, Packer and his sources fear.

The other 1,000 "choose" to traditionally publish. This isn't really true at all, because in choosing to go this route, you aren't really choosing to publish. You are choosing to SUBMIT. You are choosing to buy a lottery ticket. Maybe ten people out of a thousand (probably a whole lot less) are statistically likely to win that lottery, but what they do not know (because they've been lied to) is that winning that lottery does not guarantee them either a published book or a working wage. Winning this lottery just means that they've secured an agent. It allows them to buy another lottery ticket, which, if they win that one (maybe one out of those ten... maybe,) dumps them into a pool of people most of whom are not making enough to write full time. Now, the 990 who do not win the first lottery, they don't ever traditionally publish. Their numbers are expunged. DBW doesn't count them as authors, and they are not even considered in the statistics. They never existed. What happens to them, we do not know. And guess what? The ten who win the first lottery - most of them never get published either. AT ALL. Those who fail at this step do not end up being published (most of them,) and they don't get counted either. They go back into the unwashed and uncounted pool of people who never existed to DBW and the other so-called data services. Some few might choose to resubmit, to go to the back of the line and to do this year, after year, after year. They've been told that if they get the golden ring, then that means that they are "legitimate." They consider themselves real authors (as opposed to those cattle who self-publish,) so they stay on the treadmill and never publish. The irony is that since they consider themselves real authors, they never do publish. Ever. Yet, they feel superior to those who saw this all as what it truly is... a mind screw by a dying system that stopped caring about authors and readers a long time ago. Some will just give up. They'll go back to their teacher job, start a business, or punch a clock somewhere. Way, way, way less than 1% will ever make a living at what they chose to do.

Barnes barnes noble logo& Noble has just received a buyout offer from G Asset Management, a little-known private investment firm. This firm is looking to acquire a 51% stake in the bookseller, and they’re willing to put up $672 million, or about $22 a share.The firm has stated that they plan to spin out the Nook division as a separate venture apart from the retail stores and the college stores. If G Asset Management cannot buy B&N, they made a second offer for the just a controlling interest in Nook Media at $5 a share.

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

A version of this list appears in the March 2, 2014 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Rankings reflect sales for the week ending February 15, 2014.

You'll have a hard time finding a copyright monopoly maximalist who insists that public libraries should be banned. This would be political suicide; instead, they typically tell lies about why it's not the same thing as online sharing. Let's have a look.

Then it’s time to take a long look at the culture surrounding self-publishing. We’ve moved past the time where we need to champion the cause, okay? We’ve seen enough success in that space and have plenty of positive examples it’s time to stop acting as cheerleaders.And it’s time to start acting as critics.

Book retailing on the Internet, let alone an offer that is ebooks only, hardly cuts it as a stand-alone business anymore. The three companies most likely to be in the game and selling ebooks ten years from now are Amazon, Apple, and Google. The ebook business will not be material to any of them — it is only really close to material for Amazon now — which is why we can be sure they will see no need to abandon it. It is a strategic component of a larger ecosystem, not dependent on the margin or profit it itself produces. And the rest of their substantial businesses assure they’ll still be around as a company to run that ebook business.

A new generation of e-books is creating opportunities for students to engage with challenging texts, and also to make their own meaning from curated resources. Here are just two examples of what's on the horizon.

When you are on the fence about buying an eBook, often the only thing you can do is download a free sample. One of the big problems with this approach is the number of pages included in the sample. If a book has a large table of contents, a forward, likely you won’t even get to read the first chapter. I took a look at a title “Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box,” by the Arbinger Institute. The entire first half of the sample chapter for this book is nothing but promotional testimonials — the kind of blurbs you’d see on the back cover of a paperback. Then follows the cover art and front matter. Finally, at the very end, you get to the actual content: barely what would fit on a single printed page, and just 4% of the total sample chapter file. It’s a brief introduction that indicates almost nothing of the substance and style of the book.

AmazonNuvem de Livros is going to be facing increased competition from Brazil’s Nuvem de Livros later this year. This ebook subscription service, which boasts a million users in Brazil and Argentina, is planning to expand their service in South America and Central America later this year.

In the world’s first bookless public library in the US state of Texas, the rows-upon-rows of books that fill traditional libraries have been replaced with high-tech gadgets that cater to both adults and children.Instead of taking home books, registered residents of the south Texas county of Bexar - which has never had a public library or a bookstore - will be able to access over tens of thousands of titles from e-readers for free.

After receiving feedback from customers and webinar attendees, Adobe has revised the migration timetable for customers. “Adobe does not plan to stop support for ACS 4 or RMSDK 9. ACS 5 books will be delivered to the older RMSDK 9 based readers”, according to Shameer Ayyappan, Senior Product Manager at Adobe. “We will let our resellers and publishers decide when they wish to set the DRM flag on ACS 5, thus enforcing the need for RMSDK 10 based readers.”

A new report out of the Netherlands this week has revealed that the Dutch are buying ebooks at a rate far higher than the global average.The market research firm GfK reported earlier this week that the average Dutch ereader contained 117 ebooks, of which a grand total of 11 were bought with money. This data is drawn from a GfK survey, and it’s not clear when the survey was polled or how many people responded, but GfK did also add that ebooks made up about 4.5% of the Dutch book market.

On the one side we have people arguing based on far from complete data that growth has flattened, while on the other side we have people, some with an emotional investment in continued growth, arguing that the data is incomplete and providing anecdotal evidence that they’re still seeing increased.The topic is so contentious that I was surprised yesterday when I came across an infographic which (almost) reports on the topic fairly. It’s from Sainsbury’s, and it appears to have been created in August so it is a little out of date and is missing a lot of current data.

Despite tight budgets that have compounded the numerous challenges to implementation, media specialists are “generally enthusiastic about the continued adoption of ebooks” by their students, and usage in school libraries—especially at the high school level—is expected to continue rising incrementally, according to the 2013 Survey of Ebook Usage in U.S. School (K–12) Libraries. The annual survey, the fourth of its kind, was produced by School Library Journal and sponsored by Follett.

I've been writing about "digital rights management" (DRM) for years in this column, but here I am, about to write about it again. That's because DRM – sometimes called "copy protection software" or "digital restrictions management" – is one of the most salient, and least understood, facts about technology in the contemporary world.When you get into a discussion about DRM, you often find yourself arguing about whether and when copying and sharing should be allowed. Forget that for now. It's beside the point, for reasons that will shortly be clear. Instead, let's talk about the cold, hard legal, technical, marketplace and normative realities of DRM. Let's talk about what happens with DRM in the real world.

For the last five years, while many publishers have been focusing on digital innovation in order to capture the attention of what appeared to be a growing audience of tablet owners, some innovative publishers have been finding new ways to use print on demand services from Ingram Content Group to repackage content, enter into the print marketplace for the first time, and connect a new generation of readers to print books through personalization.Because print on demand eliminates a number of costs by allowing publishers to print with a relatively short turn-around or through a small print-run, it has allowed some publishers to rethink their print business, offer new opportunities they previously had not explored, and even take bestselling ebooks and create print versions of those titles.

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

A version of this list appears in the February 16, 2014 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Rankings reflect sales for the week ending February 1, 2014.